America’s Transition from a Democracy to the National Security State. The Derogation of Civil Rights in the Homeland

In Five Easy Steps. And What We Can Do about It. Part II

By Robert Abele

Global Research, July 28, 2015



Part One of this analysis set out the main parts of the shift in U.S. government from democracy to National Security State. In this part, we will complete and analyze this development.

5) Do not count (foreign or domestic) civilians as important to State functioning

First, abroad, civilians are “collateral damage,” like destroyed property.

The Bush administration and its generals did not consider the category of discrimination to be of importance. The Obama administration has continued this policy. This is demonstrated by two facts: first, the U.S. military spokespersons have stated directly and consistently that the U.S. does not count the civilian dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the U.S. government either does not release or downplays civilian casualties in Libya, Syria, Yemen, or from U.S. drone attacks. If it was truly U.S. policy to protect noncombatants from a brutal dictator (e.g. Saddam Hussein; Muammar Gaddafi, Bashir al Assad, etc.) and to avoid injuring or killing them, one would think that knowing how many they have killed or for whose deaths they are at least partly responsible would be something the military would want to know and engage, not suppress.

Contradictory to that practice, by a long and time-honored tradition in ethics and in international law, when the practice of either ignoring (by not taking into account) or intending civilian deaths becomes commonplace, whether proportional or not to the good intention of defeating the enemy, any military action may be said to be conducted unjustly. How the civilians came to be killed is critical, because it tells us directly about the conduct of the war.

Second, the State becomes repressive of citizens domestically. When Supreme Emergency becomes the order of the day, it uses its force against its citizens. For example, Hitler’s February 28 “Decree for the Protection of the People” suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties, and was never repealed.

We are witnessing a similar movement in the U.S. Beginning in 2001 with the USA PATRIOT Act, civil liberties have been deliberately and systematically eroded, while elite privilege has expanded. There are particular issues concerning due process rights and habeas corpus that were eroded under this model. This can be seen in the arrests of both Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi, both of which concern due process and habeas corpus rights, denied by the government. Both are U.S. citizens. Hamdi was arrested in 2001, and held without charge by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was only with the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that Hamdi was released. Padilla was arrested in 2002 and held without charge until 2006. For most of their period of detention without charge, neither was permitted legal counsel, or a hearing. It was only due to the pressure of civil liberty groups that each was finally given a hearing.

For Obama’s contribution to this, note his deepening of unchecked surveillance powers (including warrantless wiretapping of citizens, accessing personal records, monitoring financial transactions, and tracking email, internet and cell phone use), his position that the federal government cannot be sued for illegal spying on U.S. citizens, his claims of Executive privilege to order assassinations of U.S. citizens, and his continuation of torture and Guantanamo Bay prison.

All of these actions and others are instances of the direct legislative erasing of any legal status of the individual, in some cases individual U.S. citizens. As if to underscore this point, witness General Wesley Clark stated on MSNBC, on July 17, that dissident citizens should be put in internment camps “for the duration” of the U.S. war on terrorism—i.e. forever.

Kevin Phillips (Wealth and Democracy) and Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) have eloquently traced how these structural mechanisms of government in Rome, Spain, Portugal, and Britain all led to repressive governments which fell quickly when they began to govern through a structure of repression. Today we see the similar structures in place in the U.S., not only in such draconian pieces of legislation as the USA PATRIOT Act, but most chillingly in “continuity of government” (COG) plans, prepared twenty years ago by elite government insiders, which calls for warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, and militarizing domestic security to keep dissent nonexistent (see Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy” The Asia-Pacific Journal, January 24, 2011).

Conclusion: Three steps for making change

The obvious question is: how can we stop this and make the critical changes needed to and in our government apparatus? I would conclude this essay by suggestion three actions that may be taken.

First, recognize that U.S. citizens themselves must make the changes required to and in government. With the foundational mode of state structure and purpose being to achieve and maintain complete state hegemony in the world, radical change of state structure is required. This can only be done with some kind of people’s push to return the power to themselves, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia, and now see in Greece. It will come slowly and painstakingly, but without it, state mechanisms will continue to be structured as hegemonic agencies, and perpetual war and continued assault upon citizen rights will be the ongoing and deepening modus operandi of the state.

Second, focus objective analysis on ethical and legal prescriptions as well as empirical facts and consequences. Too often political analysis revolves around a theme of “this move, that consequence” by our political leaders. However, ethically speaking, objective analysis can be done by analyzing how government actions fit or do not fit universal ethical norms. A good norm would be, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas puts it, to recognize that for authentic communication between parties to take place, all affected must be able to accept the consequences of any proposed norm.

This strategy does two things: it pre-empts the charge from opponents that one believes only according to one’s ideology; and it allows one to see and show the pattern of a movement from democracy to fascism.

Here is an application of such analysis. Let us examine the crime of aggression of Obama’s drone strikes, specifically the U.S. use of drones in Yemen and Pakistan. The U.S. first said it used targeted killing in November 2002, with the cooperation and approval of the government of Yemen. But as of 2013, the U.S. had more than 6,000 drones, more than 160 of which were Predator drones controlled by the U.S. Air Force. These drones are being used in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, but most of all in Pakistan, where in eight years the drones killed close to 4,000 people (see Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone).

On June 3, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) delivered a report sharply critical of US tactics. The report asserted that the US government has failed to keep track of civilian casualties of its military operations, including the drone attacks, and to provide means for citizens of affected nations to obtain information about the casualties and any legal inquests regarding them.

Obama’s response: ignore the U.N. report, and increase the drone attacks, thus instantiating what neocon architect Francis Fukuyama stated: the U.N. is “perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism” When it isn’t, the National Security State can and does ignore them. (see Chomsky,Hegemony or Survival).

Contradictory to that, we would have a solid ethical and legal analysis of U.S. drone actions by quoting a tentative definition of aggression which was adopted by the U.N. International Law Commission on June 4, 1951. It stated:

“Aggression is the use of force by a State or Government against another State or Government, in any manner, whatever the weapons used and whether openly or otherwise, for any reason or for any purpose other than individual or collective self-defence or in pursuance of a decision or recommendation by a competent organ of the United Nations.”

Further, in 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI, specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

Again, we should apply the Geneva Conventions against Attacking Civilians. Article 51, Section 2 proscribes “indiscriminate attacks:” those not directed at specifically military targets; those attacks or weapons that cannot be limited to military objectives and that strike civilians or civilian objects as well as military ones; and attacking military targets that the belligerent has reason to believe in advance will cause excessive and disproportionate damage to civilians or civilian objects, the latter defined simply as non-military objects.

Protocol II, “relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts,” specifically calls upon all nations to refrain from all “violence to the life, health, and physical and mental well-being of [noncombatant] persons.”

Finally, the Hague Conventions of 1899 ban the attacking of towns and cities that are undefended, and collective punishment. Prescriptions to limit the conduct of war include the requirements to warn towns of impending attacks, to protect cultural, religious, and health institutions, and to insure public order and safety.

Third, understand that civil disobedience is the only weapon citizens have to fight such overwhelming methods of force that are now in place. The state—on both federal and local government levels—now possesses so much military-level force and political-economic power that they can fairly easily respond to any type of violent action. Nonviolence is the only option, especially since, to work, nonviolence requires a force in numbers. When that happens, the fear moves from the people to the government officials and their economic elite controllers who currently rule the country.

The motivating factor for such disobedience is often said to be economic hardship, such as the citizens of Greece are undergoing. That is certainly true, but in addition to that, U.S. citizens are used to a more developed and robust conception of human and civil rights, and the practice of limited government in terms of such rights. This assumption of most citizens makes a full-blown totalitarian state such as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s unlikely. Nonetheless, it is certainly conceivable and possible that a totalitarian-light state can exist while leaving in place the main skeleton of a republican democracy that has long since been reduced to a minimal democracy, virtually without most citizens seeing it and without angering citizens too much. This is especially true if the citizens live in fear and are willing to grant the government significant leeway in its responses to the trumped-up fear of terrorists. That is precisely what has happened since 9/11, and precisely what civil disobedience attempts to overcome.

Objective, public analysis and civil nonviolent action are our best weapons against government power. They are, in fact, not just our best hope; they are all we have left with which to fight.

Dr. Robert Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, in California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books, including A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, and The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, along with numerous articles. His new book, Rationality and Justice, is forthcoming (2016).

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Robert Abele, Global Research, 2015

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USA Freedom Act signed, so what’s next for NSA spying?

June 3, 2015 by Scott Bomboy



President Barack Obama has signed the USA Freedom Act, which changes how the NSA spies on Americans citizens. So what are the changes and are there constitutional implications?

In the end, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell reluctantly agreed to support the House-approved USA Freedom Act, which replaces key provisions of the Patriot Act. Despite efforts by Senator Rand Paul to delay the act, and efforts by McConnell and others to amend it in the Senate, the act passed in the Senate with 67 yes votes.

McConnell remained critical of the Freedom Act on Tuesday as it moved toward finality. “This is a significant weakening of the tools that were put in place in the wake of 9/11 to protect the country,” McConnell said. “I think Congress is misreading the public mood if they think Americans are concerned about the privacy implications.

On the surface, the USA Freedom Act curtails, but doesn’t end, the government’s ability to get phone metadata records of American citizens and others. After a six-month transition period, the USA Freedom Act shifts the burden of keeping the phone records to private companies; and the NSA must get individualized permissions from the secret FISA court to get relevant, targeted information from a phone company storing the records. It also provides for an adversarial advocate in the secret FISA court and the release of certain FISA court decisions publicly. The Freedom Act also restores a roving wiretap provision and a lone-wolf provision from the Patriot Act.

Surveillance will certainly continue under other parts of the act and under other government programs designed to combat terrorism. But the fight in Congress may just be getting started.

The New York Times says that Senator Mike Lee and Senator Pat Leahy are moving on to targeting the government program that allows e-mails older than six months to be read by investigators. Congressional reformers may also seek to limit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And there is debate in the House and Senate about other spying provisions.

“Some of us don’t think USA Freedom sufficiently ends bulk metadata collection. In fact, [the government] will still contend after the act passes that they can bulk collect all of the websites and emails and all that content,” said Representative Thomas Massie. “Read it closely, it’s only about your phone calls.”

“I think Ben Franklin would’ve been proud of this outcome,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act. “I think our framers really understood the importance of this underlying tension … they understood the dynamic of protecting security and liberty at the same time. Today we struck a blow for finding that balance that will truly accomplish both of those things.”

The six-month transition period for moving the phone records back to private parties is also important, because there is already one adverse federal court decision against the Patriot Act, and two other federal court decisions are pending.

The controversy over the Patriot Act’s Section 215 erupted in 2013 when former NSA analyst Edward Snowden disclosed a massive government system to harvest Americans’ phone records, which is authorized by a secret court. The NSA system used blanket court orders, and not specific search warrants, to compel phone companies to hand over customer metadata to the NSA.

The phone metadata contain basic phone number information, and not the content of calls or the names of callers. But that in itself, critics say, violates the First and Fourth Amendment rights of Americans since the information isn’t obtained via the warrant process.

With reservations, Snowden did comment on the act’s passage on Tuesday from Russia. “For the first time in recent history we found that despite the claims of government, the public made the final decision and that is a radical change that we should seize on, we should value and we should push further,” he said. “If we collect everything, we understand nothing. … We’re spending resources for no benefit in terms of public safety and a real cost in terms of freedom and liberty.”

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This damning quote from judges reveals the unprecedented scope of NSA spying

ERIN FUCHS


MAY 7, 2015, 11:02 AM

Rick Bowmer/APThe National Security Agency's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah.

See Also

FORMER NSA JUDGE: The Spying Court Should Not Be Approving Dragnet Surveillance

The Best Explanation Yet Of How The NSA's PRISM Surveillance Program Works

Civil liberties groups can't agree on how to curb NSA surveillance

A US appeals court has ruled the Patriot Act never authorized the National Security Agency's collection of Americans' phone records, and its opinion reveals just how unprecedented in scope that collection was.

The laws that the US government used to defend its vast surveillance program "have never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here," the opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated.

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle in 2013 on the agency's surveillance program, which collected so-called metadata from phone calls. (Metadata includes phone numbers, duration of calls, and times of calls.)

While metadata collection doesn't monitor the content of what people say, the appeals court described the volume of the information the government sought as "staggering" and not authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act as the government argued it was.

The NSA's metadata collection was much broader in scope than other methods the government uses to collect information like search warrants and subpoenas, the appeals court said. From the opinion:

Search warrants and document subpoenas typically seek the records of a particular individual or corporation under investigation, and cover particular time periods when the events under investigation occurred. The orders at issue here contain no such limits ... The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects, or of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects — they extend to every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist ... The government can point to no grand jury subpoena that is remotely comparable to the real‐time data collection undertaken under this program.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is set to expire this summer. If Congress renews it the US government may ask the Supreme Court to overturn the Second Circuit's spying decision.

"This was a surprising decision given the reluctance of courts to second-guess intelligence-gathering in the war on terror," UCLA law professor Adam Winkler told Business Insider in an email. "Given the importance of this ruling for national security, the Supreme Court is likely to step in."



Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/second-circuit-reveals-scope-of-nsa-metadata-collection-2015-5#ixzz3ZTFJStlt

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The New Surveillance Bills That Could Replace the USA Patriot Act

Kate Knibbs

As key provisions of the Patriot Act are about to expire in June, Congress is in a big hurry to figure out how to reform surveillance. Unfortunately, none of the bills being seriously considered will fix the United States’ broken surveillance apparatus.

Snowden Nightmare Act

The first bill, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would keep everything about government spying just the way it is. It doesn’t have a name yet but it might as well be called the Snowden Nightmare Act.

McConnell’s bill extends the Patriot Act to 2020, including Section 215, which is what the NSA used to justify mass surveillance. His bill disregards any need for intelligence community reform, to the point where it almost seems like he doesn’t care about public opinion (or, obviously, letting people get spied on). It’s an irresponsible piece of legislation that reinforces institutional privacy abuses.

The USA Freedom Act

Compared to McConnell’s love letter to unconstitutional domestic spying, the USA Freedom Act reads like a piece of genuine surveillance reform, written by privacy angels.

The USA Freedom Act would prohibit using Section 215 to authorize the NSA’s bulk data collection program, as well as FISA’s pen/trap statute and national security letters. What that means is that if the bill passes, the NSA won’t be able to scoop up data en masse from telecom companies like it did before; instead, it would be required to request data using keywords. The act also declassifies big FISA court opinions.

Those are good things! And with its patriotic name engineered to garner bipartisan support, USA Freedom is getting pushed as a way to curb government oversteps, with support across the aisle and from big tech companies like Google and Facebook.

Unfortunately, the USA Freedom Act concedes far too much. It doesn’t touch the Drug Enforcement Agency’s surveillance programs. The transparency requirements are lax, so the government won’t have to say how many people it snooped on. It expands surveillance of foreign nationals coming in and out of the country, and increases penalties for people caught providing “material support” to terrorists.

Surveillance State Repeal Act

Many civil liberties groups believe that the USA Freedom Act doesn’t go far enough. “This bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision—the material-support provision—would represent a significant step backwards,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement. “The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform.”

Jaffer wants Congress to let Section 215 sunset completely, a common sentiment among privacy activists who are USA Freedom Act skeptics—they’d rather let it expire and wait for a better reform package than endorse something half-baked.

Members of the anti-surveillance Civil Liberties Coalition are dismissing the USA Freedom Act in support of the Surveillance State Repeal Act, a far more comprehensive piece of legislation in the House that completely repeals the Patriot Act, as well as 2008’s FISA Amendments Act.

Supporters of Surveillance Are Criticizing These Bills, Too

Even supporters admit that the USA Freedom Act has its problems. The Center for Democracy and Technology endorses the bill, but it points out that it doesn’t limit data retention for information collected on people who turn out to have no connection to a suspect or target, and emphasizes that this is not an omnibus solution.

Whether or not it passes, it’s clear that the USA Freedom Act is no cure-all for surveillance abuses. It may not even be a cure-some. Yet better alternatives, like the Surveillance State Repeal Act, have no real chance of garnering support in Congress precisely because they are so much more comprehensive that they will invariably alienate the intelligence community.

Incremental reform is usually better than nothing, but the USA Freedom Act presents a conundrum: Is this like accepting a Band-Aid for a gunshot wound? Or is it a realpolitik baby-step away from surveillance abuses?


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In the name of making us "safe," the NSA has shredded privacy rights and now treats all citizens as suspects

October 2013, Volume 15, Number 10
Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer


View this issue as a PDF

You're not paranoid--they really are spying on you


Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist of the last century, was famous for drawings of what he called "inventions" --complicated contraptions and convoluted schemes for achieving the simplest of goals. His "Simple Lawn Sprinkler," for example, involves (A) a man on a porch rocking back in his chair on (B) a squeeze bulb that sprays water causing (C) a shirt on a clothesline to shrink, thus pulling (D) a string that (E) tips a shelf, dumping (F) a heavy homemade biscuit down into (G) a butterfly net, causing its (H) rod to lift (I) a hood and expose (J) a mouse, which is chased by (K) a cat strapped to (L) a revolving platform, which turns rapidly as the cat and mouse go in a circle, causing (M) a laughing hyena sitting on the platform to spin around and around, with the hyena's nose tickled at every turn by (N) a feather ball, prompting him to laugh so hard he cries--and, as the hyena spins, his tears are flung out to water the lawn.

Apparently, Rube was also the designer of the National Security Agency's "Simple Catch-a-Terrorist Program," for only a mind as impish as his could've invented such a preposterous, roundabout spy scheme. Rather than simply targeting terrorists and really homing in on them, NSA is running a labyrinthian, secret, extravagant, unconstitutional, and out-of-control electronic surveillance operation that targets you. Yes, you! And me. And every other American living in our Land of the Free. This agency has redefined citizens as suspects.



Not that NSA officialdom actually thinks that you, Mr. Upright or Ms. Doright, are terrorists or even "persons of interest" --but, then again, you might be. So, the spook bureaucracy has unilaterally chosen to put its convenience over your constitutional rights. Doing the serious police work to sort out the tiny number of people in our country who are connected in any substantive way to real terrorist threats is too much bother for NSA's techno-warriors, so they've taken the shortcut of dumping all 330 million of us into a digitalized, guilty-until-found-innocent box, keeping an unblinking computer eye on us, and hoping the few bad guys stand out.

They have created an elaborate, electronic Rube-Goldbergish spy matrix that (A) appropriates and agglomerates everyone's "metadata" (a geek term defined as data that provides information about other data), channels it into (B) banks of rapidly spinning supercomputers that (C) analyze your and my terrorist inclinations, based on (D) the phone calls we make and get, (E) emails we send and receive, (F) websites we visit and topics we Google, (G) Facebook friends and pages we like, (H) credit card expenditures and bank transactions we make, and--most telling of all (I) whether we have or have ever had a laughing hyena in our yard.
The SuperLux
Question: "Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you're saying?" Obama: "No, I can't." ---- Aug. 9 press conference when the President claimed that NSA's spying is not abusive.

NSA is not just one more entity chipping away at our privacy rights. Its intrusion is huge, both in its unprecedented reach and in its autocratic reordering of our way of life. Our government certainly has the right and duty (just as the governments of other nations) to eavesdrop on those who plot terrorist attacks and pose an actual threat to us. But this is not that. As the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, NSA "is sweeping up billions and billions of emails and telephone calls every single day from people around the world and in the United States who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism."

By taking advantage of the pervasive fog of fear blanketing our country since 9/11, this secret arm of government has become the SuperLux Vacuum Cleaner of the Total Surveillance Society. Using the infamous PATRIOT Act, some ridiculously permissive rulings by secret courts, cosmic leaps in surveillance technology, and meek political oversight, NSA has rapidly expanded its power over us since 2001. So, now it routinely and massively violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and maybe even the Sixth.

The most telling thing to know about this elephantine spy outfit is that we have known nothing about it! Until June of this year, you and I, the incurious media, and probably 99 percent of Congress had no clue that such a rampaging monster had so stealthily arisen in our midst.

Just as alarming, those who did know (Presidents Bush and Obama and a few top congressional leaders) felt no duty to inform us. In fact, we still wouldn't know about it--except that several whistleblowers came forward, including one uncommonly bold commoner: Edward Snowden. A 30-year-old computer whiz who worked for an NSA contractor as a systems administrator, he was appalled by what he found the agency doing--and in June he began blowing one of the loudest whistles ever. Snowden pulled a treasure trove of information from NSA's computers and began releasing those dark secrets to Greenwald and other journalists. Stunning revelations continue to pour out of Snowden's laptop, literally blowing the cover off a security state run amok.

Of course, the security establishment has cravenly tried to deflect attention from his releases by making him the villain. "Traitor!" barked boneheaded House Speaker John Boehner, and Obama piled on as well. But the actual betrayers of our people and values are the Boehners and Obamas of both parties, who secretly created, funded, and continuously expanded this illegal spy machine. Whatever you think of Snowden's tactics, he has performed a profound public service by revealing, as one scribe called it, "an intelligence underworld" that threatens our core liberties.
The whole elephant

Do the three hop

To see how easy it is for millions of innocent citizens to get caught up in NSA's vast electronic web, consider the "Three HOP Analysis." ... [read more]

Embarrassed and irritated by Snowden's leaks, Obama charged at an Aug. 9 press conference that Snowden was presenting a false picture of NSA by releasing sensational parts of its work piecemeal: "Rather than have a trunk come out here and a leg a come out there," he said, "let's just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they're looking at."

Full disclosure--terrific! "America is not interested in spying on ordinary people," he assured us. The government, he went on, is not "listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's emails."

Six days later, a Washington Post headline blared: "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." In an internal audit last year of just its DC-area spy centers, the agency itself found 2,776 "incidences" of NSA overstepping its legal authority. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, surveillance laws themselves "are extraordinarily permissive," so it's doubly troubling that the agency is surging way past what it is already allowed to do. The ACLU adds that these reported incidents are not simply cases of one person's rights being violated--but thousands of Americans being snared, totally without cause, in NSA's indiscriminate, computer-driven dragnet.

The agency's surveillance net stretches so wide that it is inherently abusive, even though its legal authority to spy on Americans is quite limited. US Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the GOP sponsor of the PATRIOT Act (which NSA cites as its super-vac authority), said in July that Congress intended that it should apply only to cases directly tied to national security investigations. No lawmaker, he said, meant that government snoops should be able to conduct a wholesale grab of Americans' phone, email, and other personal records and then store them in huge databases to be searched at will.

Yet look at what NSA has become:
The three billion phone calls made in the US each day are snatched up by the agency, which stores each call's metadata (phone numbers of the parties, date and time, length of call, etc.) for five years.
Each day, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and other telecom giants turn over to NSA the metadata on every call they have processed. Each corporation has its own secret NSA code name, including such monikers as Blarney, Lithium, and Stormbrew.
Every out-of-country call and email from (or to) a US citizen is grabbed by NSA computers, and agents are authorized to listen to or read any of them. Among the abuses of this power are incidents of agents capturing love notes and sex talk between our troops in Iraq and their spouses back home, and then passing around the juiciest communiques for the amusement of other agency staffers.
The agency searches for and seizes nearly everything we do on the internet. Without bothering with the constitutional nicety of obtaining a warrant, its XKeyscore program scoops up some 40 billion internet records every month and adds them to its digital storehouse, including our emails, Google searches, websites visited, Microsoft Word documents sent, etc. NSA's annual budget includes a quarter-billion dollars for "corporate-partner access" --i.e., payments to obtain this mass of material from corporate computers.
Snowden says that in his days as an analyst, he could sit at his computer and tap into any American's internet activity--even the President's. A blowhard congress critter called that a ridiculous lie, but with the outing of the XKeyscore program, Snowden was proven right. Indeed, it's now come out that in 2005 another analyst did tap into ex-President Bill Clinton's personal email account.
Asked at a March senate hearing whether his agency collects data "on millions or [even] hundreds of millions of Americans," NSA director James Clapper said: "No." He later apologized, claiming he was confused by US Sen. Ron Wyden's question. But, when asked by Wyden to correct his erroneous answer in the hearing record, Clapper refused.
The sheer volume of information sucked up by the agency is so large that as of 2008, it maintained 150 data processing sites around the world.
NSA's budget is an official secret, but a Snowden document shows that it gets about $11 billion a year in direct appropriations, with more support funneled through the Pentagon and other agencies. Included in its direct appropriation last year: $48 million for a study entitled "Coping with information overload."

Apparently, though, too much is not enough for this insatiable agency. A Snowden release early last month revealed NSA's most closely guarded secret, a program code-named "Bullrun." By spending billions of dollars in the past decade on supercomputer trickery, lawyers, lobbyists, and expert safecrackers from unnamed high-tech corporations, NSA found its way around the encryption codes (i.e., locks) that protect the data in our bank accounts, medical records, email accounts, smartphones, and other deeply personal places we've been told are safe from prying eyes. These digitally scrambled codes are what secure the public trust in internet privacy. Yet NSA, using our own tax dollars, has imperiously busted the locks... and found its way around the encryption.

Clapper hails the new "cryptanalytic capabilities" of his agency, saying it can now "exploit internet traffic" by entering at will into everyone's online communications and transactions. One leading cryptographer says the breakthrough gives to NSA (and spy agencies of other countries) the ability to conduct "instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort." He adds that, "This is the golden age of spying."
Four frauds

NSA's unbridled spying is exacerbated by official lying. Here are four big ones presently being tossed at us:

1. It's just metadata. This line is meant to soothe those of us concerned about Big Brother by asserting that the content of calls we make within the US is not listened to or recorded--just phone numbers, date and time, and duration. "Telephony metadata," they call it--no privacy worries about it.

Wrong, says the ACLU, which has sued to stop NSA from sucking every American's call into its bottomless computers. The spies have neither cause nor a warrant to seize the records of innocent people, and the "innocuous" info being stored chills our rights to privacy, speech, and association. Why should NSA know that we've called a pastor, an ex-lover, a political group, a fortune teller, a bar, etc.? Call patterns reveal our habits and associations.That's not just metadata. Those are profiles. Pieces of ourselves. Hands off!

2. Lawmakers keep NSA honest. "Every member of Congress has been briefed on this program," Obama fibbed after the agency's bulk collection of US phone calls was exposed in June. Actually, just a handful (sometimes only two) get substantive briefings, while the rest get NSA talking points. When members of intelligence oversight committees do learn about agency horrors, they are not allowed to discuss them with anyone, even other lawmakers.

Besides, most members are unwilling to challenge the security state for fear of looking soft on terrorists, or of losing campaign donations from NSA's corporate partners. Last December, the Senate defeated a measure requiring NSA to disclose its domestic spying, and the House killed a July effort to stop the mass collection of our people's private data.

3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court keeps NSA legal. First, this thing is a secret court, so who would know? Its 11 members are lifetime federal judges who are handpicked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for this special surveillance "oversight" duty, and they are not accountable to any elected officials (short of being impeached), much less to the public. The court's hearings are closed, but its pro-spying decisions are not subject to judicial review, and no one but officials pushing for more spying are allowed to participate, so the privacy view is not even heard.

Thus, of 1,789 requests for electronic snooping submitted to FISC last year, not a single one was rejected. Also, even some of the court's judges have complained that NSA regularly misrepresents what it is doing -- and some have complained in their secret rulings (leaked by Snowden) that NSA is systematically violating the Fourth Amendment. Finally, a common complaint of judges is that, with no investigative power, they have no way to make an independent evaluation of NSA's requests.

4. Reform is coming! Obama has announced not one or two, but three investigative panels to review NSA's spy work and make sure it's on the up-and-up. Panel One is the Privacy and Civil Liberties Review Board, but's it's an empty vessel--until January of this year, it had no chairperson, no staff, and has done no work. PCLRB has no authority to compel testimony or subpoena documents, so it's essentially at the mercy of NSA officials to confess.

Panel Two is the US Senate's intelligence committee, which says it will do a "sweeping review of surveillance." But, its two leaders, Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, are NSA sycophants who've heretofore failed completely to provide any rigorous oversight of its work. And since Snowden's stuff hit the fan in June, both have rushed to assail him and rejected suggestions that the agency might be a tiny bit off the constitutional path.

But Panel Three is the President's main play. He announced the creation of this special "independent group" of "outside experts" in August, tasking it to "tighten a few bolts" so NSA can "maintain the trust of the people." And who better to foster trust than the outside expert chosen by Obama to oversee this group: James Clapper! Yes, the guy who lied to Congress! Yes, this external review group starts out as thoroughly compromised, since it's organized by Clapper's office and will function under his purview.
An un-American America

Like the steady slippage of our democracy into plutocracy, this clandestine slide toward autocracy raises THE BIG QUESTION: What kind of country is America going to be?

The very fine public servant, Russ Feingold, addressed this in October 2001, when he stood tall as the only US Senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Warning that its anti-democratic provisions would create a nation "where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications," Feingold rightly concluded: "That country wouldn't be America."

So here we are, having devolved from the founders' principled insistence on erecting the strongest palisades for the defense of the people's personal liberties--to now having a secret government inside our borders and inside our lives. Even the code-names of NSA's array of electronic eyes are almost comically Orwellian: PRISM, Tempora, XKeyscore, and--my favorite--Boundless Informant.

Boundless indeed. But all this, for what? To make you and me safe from terrorists, the hierarchy chants in unison. Constantly pointing to 9/11, the spies and their political henchmen solemnly assert that, hypothetically, bulk surveillance of every American might have, possibly could have, maybe would have stopped that horrific plot. But the phone conversations that mattered in that case were those that did NOT happen--the breakdown in communication between the CIA and the FBI, and between FBI headquarters and its local agents.

When the top brass of US SpyWorld did a dog and pony show for the House intelligence committee on June 18, they claimed that "dozens" of terrorist attacks had been prevented since 9/11 by NSA's SuperVac programs. Dozens? "More than 50," clarified NSA's director. But wait, how many of those were plots for terrorist attacks on our soil? "A little over 10," he mumbled. That's it? Years of scooping up ALL metadata on EVERY American to find only 10 plots?

Moreover, he was able to name only four of those 10, and none were serious threats to do major harm to Americans. In fact, one involved a bombing in India, one is a questionable case of $8,500 ostensibly sent to terrorists in Somalia, one was actually uncovered by regular police work, and the fourth was not a plot to attack the US, but to send funds abroad to Al Qaeda. For this we should shred our Bill of Rights?

We can heap plenty of blame for this on Bush-Cheney, but it has been brought to full force by Obama--a constitutional lawyer who pledged in 2008 to reverse the PATRIOT Act's assault on our civil liberties. Yet he's doing the opposite, and incredibly, he's insisting that "the program currently is not being abused." Worse, he's become testy about all the questioning of him and NSA. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said to a reporter on Sept. 13, then expressed exasperation that people don't have faith in the system: "And if people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

Well, yes sir, you do have some problems, BIG ones. Obama and the surveillance establishment are proposing a bit more "disclosure" to fix the agency's PR problem. But that's just warmed over B.S. We can't give him--or Congress--a pass on this. It's too big, too destructive of our values and self respect. NSA's domestic spy matrix and the PATRIOT Act itself confront us as a multi-eyed, hydra-headed, democracy-devouring monster. Forget disclosure--the monster must be dismantled.


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Ship of Fools? July 4th Protest Sets Sail

WEDNESDAY, JULY 03, 2013

By Staff Report





Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and others plan July 4 protest against NSA surveillance A large coalition of civil rights and privacy groups and potentially thousands of websites will stage protests on the Fourth of July to protest surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency. As part of the Restore the Fourth campaign, many website members of the 30,000-member Internet Defense League plan to display a protest of NSA surveillance and the text of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Websites participating include Reddit, where Restore the Fourth originated, WordPress, 4chan, Mozilla, Fark, and Cheezburger.com. – PCWorld

Dominant Social Theme: Finally, corporate America stands up and cries out for independence.

Free-Market Analysis: PCWorld is owned by IDG, a huge conglomerate that solicits advertising from the entire spectrum of Silicon Valley tech companies. These companies are have been cooperating intimately with US intel for a decade or more.

We are supposed to believe that these same companies plus the organizational entity for this July 4th gathering are going to represent the concerns of US citizens when it comes to privacy?

Mozilla is integrated with Google, which in turn is closely integrated with US intel. Reddit is owned by Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Condé Nast has never been known for a commitment to individual liberties.

The reason that these protests sprang up so quickly is that they are apparently using the organizational backbone of Occupy Wall Street, in part funded by uber-globalist George Soros.

OWS is best known for its lamentable attempt to pit the "99 percent" against the one percent. (We helped a good deal with the demise of OWS as a credible activist movement by pointing out this was the same sort of strategy that led to the bloody French Revolution.)

The "one percent" – comprising millions of wealthy and semi-wealthy individuals – are NOT responsible for the lamentable state of US freedoms.

It is a system of fiat money and central banking run by a tiny handful of individuals that is the problem. The formulation of the "one percent" was an attempt to direct attention away from this system of monopoly money and privilege. It was a deliberate and false paradigm and remains so.

But this is the group, nonetheless, that is organizing the protests, from what we can tell. No doubt organizers hope to derive additional or renewed credibility by hitching OWS's divisive message to more credible July 4th protests.

Here's more:

Organizers of Restore the Fourth are ... planning live protests in dozens of U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Houston and Atlanta.

"How long do we expect rational people to accept using terrorism to justify and excuse endless executive and state power?" actor John Cusack said during a press conference announcing the protests. "Why are so many in our government, our press, our intellectual class afraid of an informed public?"

Representatives of the NSA and the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence didn't immediately respond to requests for comments on the planned protests. The protests come after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about widespread NSA surveillance of U.S. residents and other people to media outlets, with the first details published last month.

... Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, complained that many defenders of the NSA surveillance programs are focusing on supposed character flaws of Snowden and the journalists who broke the story instead of on the surveillance itself and questions about its legality.

The spotlight on Snowden is a "big distraction to avoid focusing on the invasions that have actually been occurring," added Harvey Anderson, senior vice president business and legal affairs at Mozilla. The lack of transparency about the surveillance programs "undermines the openness of the Internet," he added. Efforts to downplay the surveillance and suggest that the U.S. public doesn't care won't work, added Craig Aaron, president and CEO of digital rights group Free Press.

Wikipedia tells us about the Freedom of the Press Foundation:

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 2012 to fund and support free speech and freedom of the press. The organization is headed by both mainstream and alternative journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Xeni Jardin as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers.

The mission is to help "promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government", and it offers a way to crowd-source funding for WikiLeaks and independent journalistic organizations. Supported organizations includes WikiLeaks, MuckRock News, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and Truthout.
Many of these names have ties to mainstream journalism, or mainstream funding, and constitute a kind of controlled opposition. Even the goals of the July 4th protest are depressingly modest:

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;

2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;

3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

The July 4th demonstrations seek to demand an end to the unconstitutional surveillance methods employed by the U.S. government and to ensure that all future government surveillance is constitutional, limited, and clearly defined.

These protests are being sponsored in part by the same technologists that have a history of cooperating with US intel, have been badly intimidated or have generated considerable wealth from their cooperation.

They are being organized by OWS, which is funded in part by George Soros and which has tried to create the conditions for a kind of second French Revolution in the US. The goals of the protest are to reform the unconstitutional PATRIOT Act (instead of doing away with it) and to "define and limit" further surveillance.

But ... change will not come via protests organized by a controlled opposition. Change will come as individuals begin to rediscover the freedoms on which the US (confederation) was initially based and take appropriate individual action to change their OWN circumstances.

Petitioning the US Congress will likely have little or no effect. There is a reason the US Congress has a favorability rating of about 10 percent ...

Change is hard. Protests are easy, especially violent ones.

Conclusion: They take us for fools?

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Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge

Video: Members of Congress and The White House are defending a top secret NSA program that continues to collect data from millions of phone records, but civil liberties supporters remain skeptical. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima explains.




By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Updated: Thursday, June 6, 9:09 PM


The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular “target” and “facility” were both connected to terrorism or espionage.

In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as “facilities” and agreed to occasionally certify that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of “U.S. persons” data without a warrant.

Several companies contacted by The Post said they had no knowledge of the program and responded only to individual requests for information.

“We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Facebook. “When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.”

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U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and EDWARD WYATT
Published: June 5, 2013


WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The order does not apply to the content of the communications.

Verizon Business Network Services is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers for corporations. It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cellphone services, or to other telecommunications carriers. The order prohibits its recipient from discussing its existence, and representatives of both Verizon and AT&T declined to comment Wednesday evening.

The four-page order was disclosed Wednesday evening by the newspaper The Guardian. Obama administration officials at the F.B.I. and the White House also declined to comment on it Wednesday evening, but did not deny the report, and a person familiar with the order confirmed its authenticity. “We will respond as soon as we can,” said Marci Green Miller, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security purposes, including “tangible things” like a business’s customer records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The order was marked “TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN,” referring to communications-related intelligence information that may not be released to noncitizens. That would make it among the most closely held secrets in the federal government, and its disclosure comes amid a furor over the Obama administration’s aggressive tactics in its investigations of leaks.

The collection of call logs is set to expire in July unless the court extends it.

The collection of communications logs — or calling “metadata” — is believed to be a major component of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance that took place without court orders. The newly disclosed order raised the question of whether the government continued that type of information collection by bringing it under the Patriot Act.

The disclosure late Wednesday seemed likely to inspire further controversy over the scope of government surveillance. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, said that “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law” under the Bush administration. “On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?” she said.

For several years, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have been cryptically warning that the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under that section of the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming to the public if it knew about it.

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

They added: “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

A spokesman for Senator Wyden did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the Verizon order.

The senators were angry because the Obama administration described Section 215 orders as being similar to a grand jury subpoena for obtaining business records, like a suspect’s hotel or credit card records, in the course of an ordinary criminal investigation. The senators said the secret interpretation of the law was nothing like that.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act made it easier to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain business records so long as they were merely deemed “relevant” to a national-security investigation.

The Justice Department has denied being misleading about the Patriot Act. Department officials have acknowledged since 2009 that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and have insisted that their statements about the matter have been accurate.

The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2011 for a report describing the government’s interpretation of its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act. But the Obama administration withheld the report, and a judge dismissed the case.


A version of this article appeared in print on June 6, 2013, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Secretly Collecting Logs of Business Calls.

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Enabling a Future American Dictator

These are truly troubling days for liberty in the United States.

Last week the 60 day deadline for the president to gain congressional approval for our military engagement in Libya under the War Powers Resolution came and went. The media scarcely noticed. The bombings continued. We had a hearing on Capitol Hill on the subject, but the administration refuses to bother with the legality of its new war. It is unclear if Mr. Obama will ever obtain congressional consent, and astonishingly it is being argued that he doesn't need it.


Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution begs to differ. It clearly states that the power to declare war rests within the legislative branch - the branch closest to the people. The founders were a war-weary people, and the requirement that it would take an act of Congress to go to war was intentional. They believed war was not to be entered into lightly, so they resisted granting such decision making authority to one person. They objected to absolute warmaking power granted to Kings. It would be incredibly naïve to think a dictator could not or would not wrest power in this country.

Our Presidents can now, on their own: order assassinations, including American citizens; operate secret military tribunals; engage in torture; enforce indefinite imprisonment without due process; order searches and seizures without proper warrants, gutting the 4th Amendment; ignore the 60 day rule for reporting to the Congress the nature of any military operations as required by the War Power Resolution; continue the Patriot Act abuses without oversight; wage war at will; and treat all Americans as suspected terrorists at airports with TSA groping and nude x-rays.

Americans who are not alarmed by all of this are either not paying close attention, or are too trusting of current government officials to be concerned. Those in power right now might be trustworthy, upstanding people. But what of the leaders of the future? They will inherit all the additional powers we cede to the current position holders. Can we trust that they will not take advantage? Today's best intentions create loopholes and opportunities for tomorrow's tyrants.

Perhaps the most troubling power grab of late is the mission creep associated with the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Initiated as targeted strikes against the perpetrators of 9/11, a decade later we are still at war. With whom? Last week Congress passed a Defense Authorization bill with some very disturbing language that explicitly extends the president's war powers to just about anybody. Section 1034 of that bill states that we are at war with the Taliban, al Qaeda, and associated forces. Who are the associated forces? It also includes anyone who has supported hostilities in aid of an organization that substantially supports these associated forces. This authorization is not limited by geography, and it has no sunset provision. It doesn't matter if these associated forces are American citizens. Your constitutional rights no longer apply when the United States is "at war" with you. Would it be so hard for someone in the government to target a political enemy and connect them to al Qaeda, however tenuously, and have them declared an associated force?

My colleague Congressman Justin Amash spearheaded an effort to have this troubling language removed, but unfortunately it failed by a vote of 234 to 187. It is unfortunate indeed, that so many in Congress accept unlimited warmaking authority in the hands of the executive branch.

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Patriot Act vote extends spying tactics

Photo (Courtesy) http://www.caivn.org/article/2010/02/28/president-obama-signs-patriot-act-extension

Congress on Thursday approved a four-year extension to key provisions of the Patriot Act that continue the ability of federal investigators to use aggressive surveillance tactics in connection with suspected terrorists.

By Paul Kane and Felicia Sonmez

The Washington Post


WASHINGTON — Congress on Thursday approved a four-year extension to key provisions of the Patriot Act that continue the ability of federal investigators to use aggressive surveillance tactics in connection with suspected terrorists.

Overcoming objections from a bipartisan clutch of libertarian-minded lawmakers, the legislation passed the Senate, 72-23, and the House, 250-153.

Lawmakers faced a midnight deadline to pass an extension before the provisions expire. President Obama is attending a summit in France, but aides said he would direct aides to have the bill signed by an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature.

Some supporters had warned that any interruption in the law could have dire consequences for national security, while opponents demanded more time to debate the need for such provisions almost 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We shouldn't be fearful. We shouldn't be fearful of freedom; we shouldn't be fearful of individual liberty," freshman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the legislation's lead opponent, said Thursday.

Under the provisions extended into 2015, investigators could get court orders to follow terrorism suspects with "roving wiretaps" that cover multiple phone numbers and multiple carriers. It would also extend provisions allowing investigators to seize customer records for suspected terrorists.

The vote on the bill came less than a month after U.S. special-operations forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

"The raid that killed Osama bin Laden also yielded an enormous amount of new information that has spurred dozens of investigations yielding new leads every day. Without the Patriot Act, investigators would not have the tools they need to follow these new leads and disrupt terrorist plots, needlessly putting our national security at risk," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said.

The Senate debate created unusual coalitions on the far left and far right. Paul, considered the most conservative senator, was joined in his opposition by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., among the most liberal.

Paul fought for several days to offer a string of amendments to the legislation, including one that would exempt some gun-record searches from being accessible to federal investigators. That proposal was deemed too much for even the National Rifle Association, as just 10 senators supported it and 85 voted against it.

Two Democratic critics of the Patriot Act, Sen. Ron Wyden, of Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall, of Colorado, extracted a promise from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that she would hold hearings with intelligence and law-enforcement officials on how the law is being carried out.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

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The Road to Dictatorship; Next Stop: Martial Law

by JUSTIN RAIMONDO (ANTIWAR.COM)

(March 1, 2010) That 56 percent of all Americans "think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens" isn't really all that surprising.

After all, ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government's "right" to read our e-mails, seize our property, hold us as "enemy combatants," and otherwise trample on the Constitution has been expanding at an exponential pace.

What's really shocking, however, is that, according to this CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll, released on Feb. 28, most of the people who believe this are overwhelmingly...Republicans.

That is, they are self-described supporters of the very same party which impaled the Constitution on the sword of the "war on terrorism."

According to the poll, "only 37 percent of Democrats" believe this, as opposed to "63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans."

Is it just me, or was it only yesterday that the Democratic base was outraged by "Bushitler," and the "Cheney-PNAC" alleged neo-fascists who were taking over the country and driving dissent underground? How quickly they turn!

Adding to the irony, the poll was taken on the same weekend the extension of the PATRIOT Act passed the Democratic-controlled Congress – without debate, without a peep of protest from the "progressives" in Congress, and disguised as a vote in favor of a Senate amendment to the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act.

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Source:http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=6718

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Patriot Act Extended for Another Year

Democrats, Now Short of 60-Vote Senate Super Majority, Settle for Extension Without New Privacy Protections

(AP) Senate Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to America's primary counterterrorism law, as Republicans refused to lend support and portrayed the majority as willing to harm terror investigations.

Lacking the necessary 60-vote super majority, Democratic leaders settled on a one-year extension of expiring surveillance and seizure provisions of the USA Patriot Act.

They tossed aside curbs - and greater scrutiny - on government authority agreed to by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October after spirited debate.

The extension passed Wednesday night by voice vote with no debate. The bill goes to the House of Representatives, but with key sections of the law ready to expire Sunday, there's little chance that changes will be made. Expiration of key anti-terrorism tools, even for a short time, would seriously hamper law enforcement.

The Democratic retreat is an important political victory for Republicans, who gained new ammunition for their election theme that they can better protect America. The outcome is a major disappointment for Democrats and their liberal allies like the American Civil Liberties Union and supporters who believe the Patriot Act fails to protect Americans' privacy and gives the government too much authority to spy on Americans and seize their property.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy noted that the bill had been approved in committee by a bipartisan majority. He said the measure "should be an example of what Democrats and Republicans can accomplish when we work together, but I understand some Republican senators objected to passing the carefully crafted national security, oversight and judicial review provisions in this legislation."

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on Leahy's committee, set the Republican tone in December when the same provisions faced an earlier expiration date and received a short extension.

"The bill that eventually emerged from the Judiciary Committee does not meet the key test for any national security legislation: First, do no harm," Sessions said. "The bill reported by the committee would make the jobs of our national security officials more difficult."

The Obama administration supported the revisions to the law as approved by the committee.

The three sections of the Patriot act that would stay in force:

-Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

-Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

-Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

The Judiciary Committee bill would have restricted FBI information demands known as national security letters, and made it easier to challenge gag orders imposed on Americans whose records are seized with these letters.

Library records would have received extra protections. Congress would have closely scrutinized FBI use of the Patriot Act to prevent abuses. Dissemination of surveillance results would have been restricted, and after a time, unneeded records would have been destroyed.

Republicans have been steadily pounding Democrats over the closing of the detainee prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, plus possibly holding civilian trials for detainees in the United States and for informing a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, of his right to remain silent after 50 minutes of questioning for allegedly trying to ignite explosives on a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas.

If Democrats had allowed the Senate to have a full debate on the Judiciary Committee restrictions, they would have exposed themselves to Republican arguments that Democrats were hurting law enforcement.

With their health care overhaul bill on the ropes and joblessness still high, Democratic lawmakers need a victory.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic retreat didn't please the party's liberal allies, but they recognized the political realities.

"The American Library Association understands why the Democratic leadership has to go with a clean reauthorization but that doesn't take away the disappointment we have"' said Lynne Bradley, the group's chief lobbyist. "It is more than unfortunate that Republicans think they own the ground when it comes to surveillance and national security."

Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, said, "Events of the last few months changed the tone in Washington when it comes to national security issues."

"Were it not for the Christmas Day attack, you might have seen a bill with even modest reform go through," she said, referring to the foiled attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. "The numbers weren't there."
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Source:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/25/politics/main6241401.shtml

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On alert for terrorists

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Search: Spotting a terrorist suspect

Reports are flying and fingers are pointing because suspected airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was not identified as a potential terrorist.

Abdulmutallab was on the TIDE list, but that didn't set off alarms. If he had been on the Selectee List, he might have been stopped.

He was not on the No-Fly List, but you can see who is.

Thousands of specially trained officers at 161 U.S. airports might have spotted him. They look for specific behaviors, including micro-expressions.

Some are calling for high-tech full-body scanners at airports, though others complain they're too revealing. Check out pictures of how you would look.

The "8 Signs of Terrorism" video, narrated by a football legend, gives you direction of warning signs to look for.

The profiling of these people at airports has been seen as controversial.

Remember this guy? He and Abdulmutallab used the same type of explosive, and both failed.
Video clips explain what this attempted terrorist attack could mean for travelers headed to the airport. And don't complain: It pales in comparison to security checks at the airport considered the safest in the world.

What lies ahead? Future air travel screening may include special cameras and a good, hard look at your face.

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Source:http://specials.msn.com/A-List/On-alert-for-terrorists.aspx?cp-searchtext=on%20alert%20for%20terrorists&gt1=36010

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The United States of America

CHAPTER 13


THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

We must now show that the papacy is the most deadly enemy the United States will ever have to face. This fact is virtually unknown among the people. Using the utmost secrecy to conceal her plans, the papacy, through her facade of religion, has for many decades been infiltrating the United States in all levels of government. As a result, the United States will soon lose its constitution and become a tyrannical, persecuting power.

For many decades the papacy has been laying plans for the takeover of the United States. This goal of the papacy is clearly stated in Charles Chiniquy’s book Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.

We are determined . . . to take possession of the United States, and rule them; but we cannot do that without acting secretly and with utmost wisdom. If our plans become known, they will surely be defeated. — Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, The Wickliffe Press, Protestant truth Society, Wickliffe Avenue, 104 Hendon Lane, Finchley, London, N3., 1885, p. 373.

On page 374 of this book we read:

How sad will their awakening be, when, with our out-numbering votes, we will turn them, for ever, from every position of honor, power and profit! What will those hypocritical and godless sons and daughters of the fanatical Pilgrim Fathers say, when not a single judge, not a single teacher, not a single policeman will be elected if he be not a devoted . . . Roman Catholic? What will those so-called giants think of their matchless shrewdness and ability, when not a single Senator or member of Congress will be chosen, if he be not submitted to our holy father the Pope? What a sad figure those Protestant Yankees will cut when we will not only elect the President, but fill and command the armies, man the navies, and hold the keys of the public treasury?

Then, yes! then, we will rule the United States, and lay them at the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ [the pope], that he may put an end to their godless system of education, and sweep away those impious laws of liberty of conscience which are an insult to God and man!

. . . The American people must be very blind indeed, if they do not see that if they do nothing to prevent it, the day is very near when the Jesuits will rule their country, from the magnificent White House at Washington, to the humblest civil and military department of this vast Republic. — ibid, p. 374.

As we have seen, when they say Vicar of Jesus Christ, they mean the pope.

Here is a statement from the same book that shows the power these people have already amassed in the United States.

The Jesuits of the United States form one of the richest and most powerful corporations the world ever saw. — ibid, p. 375.

The papacy is by far the wealthiest institution on earth.

Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was the poorest of the poor. Roman Catholicism, which claims to be His church, is the richest of the rich. — Avro Manhattan, The Vatican Billions, Chick Publications, p. 17.

The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. — Jack Chick, Smokescreens, Chick Publications, Chapter 10.

Very few people know anything about the Jesuits because of their extreme secrecy. Here is a description of them from the book The Great Controversy that shows the abominable character and deceptiveness of the pope’s Jesuits.

Throughout Christendom, Protestantism was menaced by formidable foes. The first triumphs of the Reformation past, Rome summoned new forces, hoping to accomplish its destruction. At this time the order of the Jesuits was created, the most cruel, unscrupulous, and powerful of all the champions of popery. Cut off from earthly ties and human interests, dead to the claims of natural affection, reason and conscience wholly silenced, they knew no rule, no tie, but that of their order, and no duty but to extend its power. The gospel of Christ had enabled its adherents to meet danger and endure suffering, undismayed by cold, hunger, toil, and poverty, to uphold the banner of truth in face of the rack, the dungeon, and the stake. To combat these forces, Jesuitism inspired its followers with a fanaticism that enabled them to endure like dangers, and to oppose to the power of truth all the weapons of deception. There was no crime too great for them to commit, no deception too base for them to practice, no disguise too difficult for them to assume. Vowed to perpetual poverty and humility, it was their studied aim to secure wealth and power, to be devoted to the overthrow of Protestantism, and the re-establishment of the papal supremacy.

When appearing as members of their order, they wore a garb of sanctity, visiting prisons and hospitals, ministering to the sick and the poor, professing to have renounced the world, and bearing the sacred name of Jesus, who went about doing good. But under this blameless exterior the most criminal and deadly purposes were often concealed. It was a fundamental principle of the order that the end justifies the means. By this code, lying, theft, perjury, assassination, were not only pardonable but commendable, when they served the interests of the church. Under various disguises the Jesuits worked their way into offices of state, climbing up to be the counselors of kings, and shaping the policy of nations. They became servants to act as spies upon their masters. They established colleges for the sons of princes and nobles, and schools for the common people; and the children of Protestant parents were drawn into an observance of popish rites. All the outward pomp and display of the Romish worship was brought to bear to confuse the mind and dazzle and captivate the imagination, and thus the liberty for which the fathers had toiled and bled was betrayed by the sons. The Jesuits rapidly spread themselves over Europe, and wherever they went, there followed a revival of popery. — E. G. White, The Great Controversy, pp. 234, 235, 1911, Pacific Press Publishing Assn.

Today the pope’s Jesuits are not only entrenched at the highest levels of all branches and departments of the U.S. Government, but they are also entrenched at the highest levels of virtually all the major corporations and industries in the United States. The Jesuits are the major stockholders of many of the largest corporations. They own 51% of the stock in Bank of America for instance. And because the papacy is a so-called church, they pay not one penny of taxes. Because they are a so-called church, they are able to operate internationally outside of the laws and legal proceedings everyone else must follow.

Here are a few of the Jesuit-controlled corporations that totally support their Jesuits in congress and the government: American Airlines, TWA, Anheuser Busch, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Boeing, Cigna, Coca-Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Exxon, Shell, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, May Company, McDonald’s, Motorola, Philip Morris, Price-Waterhouse, Rite Aid, RJR Nabisco, Sony Corp. of America, Texaco, United Parcel Service, Walt Disney Company, and Wells Fargo.

These corporations give their Jesuit senators and congressmen in both the Democratic and Republican parties many thousands of dollars for their election campaigns. These senators and congressmen are the most radical and dangerous this country has ever had. They do everything they can to pass laws and regulations prohibited by our constitution, laws designed to destroy the United States, to eliminate freedom, and to convert the United States into a ruthless tyranny. They lie constantly to deceive the people so they will go along with the laws and regulations they want to pass.

Everyone in high positions in the government takes a solemn oath to uphold and obey the Constitution, but nearly all of them totally ignore the Constitution. The president issues executive orders that are totally unconstitutional, and Congress passes laws that the Constitution specifically forbids. Our God-given Constitution is the reason the United States has become the greatest country in the world, but it is being thoroughly undermined today by the Jesuits in government as they work to destroy the United States.

The laws and regulations they pass are designed to export the industrial and manufacturing base of the United States to other countries. They are designed to destroy our energy base by restricting oil prospecting, fuel production, and nuclear power plants. The Jesuits in the House, Senate and regulating agencies restrict the private use of land with nonsensical environmental rules and regulations. They pass laws and regulations about what is “proper” to be taught in schools so that children will grow up being extremely ignorant under the banner of being educated.

The Jesuits are not recognized by the general populace because of their treachery and secrecy. They tell no one that they are Jesuits. They even belong to other churches, other organizations, and other cultures, that they have infiltrated, to hide their identity and to control these organizations.

There are millions and millions of the pope’s Jesuits. They are everywhere. They are into everything. They are into every major organization, and control nearly every political organization and government in the world. Because of the Jesuits’ extreme secrecy, many of these organizations and governments are totally unaware that they are being infiltrated and controlled.

It is easy to identify the Jesuits and the Jesuit puppets in the United States Congress, because they are the ones that continually try to get all kinds of laws passed that require exactly the opposite from what the Constitution says. They continually pass laws that restrict the liberty of the citizens of the country. They continually pass laws to regulate every aspect of life in the United States. They continually pass laws that restrict freedom of speech such as the Campaign Finance Reform Act. Incidentally, they always use names for these laws that will sound good to the American people, but rarely indicate what is in the law. They use every means they can to deceive the people of the country.

The Jesuits continually try to pass restrictive gun legislation. The second amendment to the Constitution says, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Every gun law that congress has ever passed is a direct violation of the United States’ Constitution. Because of the crime and terrorism in our country today, and because of the government and media propaganda against guns, people are made to believe that these laws are necessary.

When the citizens of a nation are armed, where their right to own guns is not infringed, the crime rate is extremely low.

Every man in Switzerland, for instance, is required to have guns in his home, including assault rifles. Crime in Switzerland is almost non-existent. In states and cities in America that allow people to carry guns, the crime rate is extremely low.

During World War Two, Hitler wanted to invade Switzerland. The Swiss told him that he could send his army across the border, but none of his officers would return. Hitler gave the order to invade Switzerland several times, but his officers refused to obey. Switzerland remained safely neutral all during the war because Hitler could not overcome the guns in the hands of Swiss private citizens. No dictator wants to be the dictator of a nation with 200 million guns around.

Christians generally do not want to have anything to do with guns, because a Christian would never take the life of another individual. It is not the USE of the guns that keeps the crime rate low; it is just the fact that the guns are there, and the criminals and would-be dictators know that the guns are there. That knowledge keeps them at bay.

In order to motivate the people of the United States to give up their guns, the Jesuits stage shootings periodically to show how “dangerous” guns are. These shootings occur in the most emotional places such as schools where children die. But Waco shows what will happen when only the government has guns. Some 86 children died a torturous death at Waco at the hands of the government.

The USA Patriot act of 2001 is in almost total violation of the constitution, requiring many of the regulations Nazi Germany and communist Russia had. When all the requirements of this act are implemented, the citizens of this country will rue the day they ever allowed such a monstrosity to become law. Jesuits in the government were responsible for this act and forced its passage. They forced a vote on this act without giving the congressmen and senators an opportunity to read it! Why didn't the congressmen and senators have the good sense to vote “no” and defeat this act since they were never able to read it?

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 is another act that was passed to take away freedom and security in the United States and is in total violation of the constitution. As all the requirements of these acts become implemented, the people of the country will learn first-hand how it feels to have absolutely no freedom. These and other laws and regulations on the books will, when implemented, convert the United States into a more ruthless police state than was Nazi Germany or communist Russia and Red China.

Today, the United States is run and controlled by its most dedicated enemies. If you wonder at the things the government and the people in control of the government do that are so damaging to the United States, it is because they are our enemies and are determined to destroy the United States. Treason is running rampant throughout all levels and branches of the U.S. government today.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. — Marcus Cicero, speaking to Caesar, Crassus, Pompey and the Roman Senate.

Many wonder today why the Republican party does nothing to defeat the treasonous schemes of the Democrats. It is because the pope’s Jesuits have thoroughly infiltrated the Republican party as well as the Democratic party. Many wonder why the news media lie so much to support and protect the Democrats. It is because the pope’s Jesuits have thoroughly infiltrated the news media. The news media and schools and colleges, with their lies and propaganda, have so conditioned the people of the country that they are unable to recognize what has been done to them. Victory for the Jesuits seems very near. The Jesuits are like a cancer that has pervaded nearly every fiber of the society of the United States. We are being defeated by the enemy within.

For many years the Jesuits have prevented the United States from developing additional sources of energy within its own territory. Exploiting the vast oilfields on the Alaskan north slope, that probably contain more oil than the entire middle east, is forbidden. New nuclear power plants, the safest source of electric energy ever discovered, are not permitted. There is no end to the lies people have been made to believe about Nuclear energy. The environment is used as the club to subdue the people of the country into going along with this idiocy. Modern technology is able to develop these sources of power without any damage to the environment. France gets 80% of its power from nuclear power plants without any problems. Needless to say, without sufficient energy, the United States will not be able to defend itself. All the papacy has to do is cut off the oil supply from the middle east.

The United States is now starting to feel the pinch of the energy shortage the Jesuits have created. People have experienced blackouts over large areas as power is shut off to stay within the limits of generating capacity. Today, instead of constructing additional nuclear power plants, some of these plants are being dismantled! Will the people of the United States be able to wake up in time to prevent the coming national tragedy?

Not only in the United States is this treachery being perpetrated by the papacy, but they are secretly at work all over the world to subvert all the nations of the world. Charles Chiniquy continues:

Rome is in constant conspiracy against the rights and liberties of man all over the world; but she is particularly so in the United States. Long before I was ordained a priest I knew that my Church was the most implacable enemy of this Republic. My professors of philosophy, history, and theology had been unanimous in telling me that the principles and laws of the Church of Rome were absolutely antagonistic to the laws and principles that are the foundation stones of the Constitution of the United States.

1st. The most sacred principle of the United States Constitution is the equality of every citizen before the law. But the fundamental principle of the Church of Rome is the denial of that [e]quality.

2nd. Liberty of conscience is proclaimed by the United States a most sacred principle, which every citizen must uphold . . . . But liberty of conscience is declared by all the Popes and Councils of Rome, a most godless, unholy, and diabolical thing, which every good Catholic must abhor and destroy at any cost.

3rd. The American Constitution assures the absolute independence of the civil from the ecclesiastical or Church power; but the Church of Rome declares, through all her Pontiffs and Councils, that such independence is an impiety and a revolt against God.

4th. The American Constitution leaves every man free to serve God according to the dictates of his conscience; but the Church of Rome declares that no man has ever had such a right, and that the Pope alone can know and say what man must believe and do. — Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, The Wickliffe Press, Protestant truth Society, Wickliffe Avenue, 104 Hendon Lane, Finchley, London, N3., 1885, p. 375.

And when the papacy takes over there will be bloodshed.

The Church of Rome says that she has a right to punish with the confiscation of their goods, or the penalty of death, those who differ in faith from the Pope. — ibid, p. 376.

America simply has no idea of the terrible trouble and persecution that is coming soon at the hands of the papacy. The people of America have forgotten the wanton cruelty and unrestrained butchery this unholy power demonstrated during the Dark Ages when it slaughtered over 150 million Christians because they wanted to worship God according to the Bible. Hitler’s holocaust against the Jews was tiny compared to the papal holocaust against Christians during the Dark Ages, and the Jesuit-controlled news media never mention these atrocities.

The papacy’s slaughter of Christians continues to this day. Since the papacy is a small country with little military capability, they always beguile other nations to do their fighting for them. Today the United States is their favorite bully. Thus, they are never directly involved, and people do not realize who is behind the wars, the trouble, and the terrorism. Avro Manhattan’s book, The Vatican’s Holocaust, describes in detail the papacy’s continuing slaughter of millions of Christians in the 20th century. At the time of this writing, the complete text of The Vatican’s Holocaust is available on the internet for downloading at:

http://www.reformation.org/holocaus.html

The slaughter in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia and others is a direct result of the Vatican’s involvement in this area, but you will never hear about it because the Jesuit-controlled news media not only refuse to mention it but they lie about the situation to keep the papacy from being suspected of her true involvement.

The Jesuits seem to have a code that guides their every action. That code is: “Call your enemy what you are and always tell the exact opposite of the truth.” This makes it very difficult to counter their lies and explain clearly and understandably what they are actually doing.

And now the world has terrorism to a degree that was unimaginable before the destruction of the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City where nearly 4,000 people lost their lives. This terrorism is part of the plan the Jesuits are implementing to scare the American people into giving up their freedoms, and it is working. The Bible says in Revelation 18:24 that the papacy is responsible for “. . . the blood of . . . all that were slain upon the earth.” Evidence strongly indicates that Muslims highjacked the airliners and flew them into the towers. Thus we have rather strong evidence that the papacy’s Jesuits have even been able to infiltrate the Muslims. Remember that the papacy and the Jesuits have been at this business for many hundreds of years. Remember, also, that we saw that no disguise is too difficult for them to assume.

Let us now consider some of the tactics the papacy is using to subvert the United States. Just because they call themselves a church does not mean that they are honest or honorable. Remember that Satan, the devil, gave the papacy their power and great authority (Revelation 13:2). The Catholics, through their Jesuits, are working to accomplish the exact opposite from what the Catholic Church claims they stand for. For instance, the church claims to be against abortion, but their Jesuits, working in secrecy and masquerading as regular citizens in the government, work to pass laws and make judicial rulings permitting abortion. They have their right hand fighting their left hand to thoroughly confuse the people of the United States and to keep the people from ever connecting this evil conspiracy with them. Here is another example. The pope gets on television and, acting very piously, prays for peace, while his Jesuits are behind the scenes stirring up all kinds of wars, conflicts and terrorism in the world.

The papacy has made colossal fools of untold millions of people down through history, and it is still doing so today.

The Jesuits are making a dedicated effort in the United States to degrade the morality of the people of the country, to destroy family life, and to destroy all the traditional values that made this country the greatest nation in the world. This is being done by the abominable subjects being taught in government schools and colleges. It is being done by history courses that teach from revisionist history books containing many more lies than the truth. It is being done with pornographic sex education courses in the schools. It is being done with the destruction of religious values and the law of God, the Ten Commandments. It is being done by television programs, where entertainment is watching people break God’s law. The natural result is a drastic increase in crime. Acts of the most abominable and shocking character are daily perpetrated within this country. The murder of one and a half million unborn babies in this country each year is one result of the demoralization of this nation.

The Jesuits are also flooding the United States with aliens, most of which are Catholic. Not only are we being defeated by the Jesuit enemy within, we are constantly being invaded by an army of aliens from without. These aliens dilute the traditional American society that understands our Constitution and how it works. This makes it much easier for the Jesuits in congress to pass the unconstitutional laws so damaging to the United States. And, of course, along with these aliens come the people who actually blow up the buildings.

There is talk in Washington of giving illegal aliens amnesty again, and also of converting our southern border into a "regional power block" where the area within 100 miles on either side of the border between Mexico and the United States would be administered jointly by Mexico and the U.S. The Jesuits are working to "eradicate the borders that separate Canada, Mexico, and the United States as part of a larger design to create a regional political and economic bloc duplicating the European Union." - The New American, October 8, 2001.

There is also talk of putting Mexican citizens in Mexico on United States' Social Security payments. The purpose of this, along with all the wars and police-keeping actions the U.S. military is into and all the welfare the government pays for, is to completely bankrupt the United States.

Pushed by the Mexican government, the Bush administration is working on a Social Security accord that would put tens of thousands of Mexicans [in Mexico] onto the Social Security roster and send hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits south of the border. - Jonathan Weisman, The Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2002.

Since the Jesuits beguiled the United States into giving the Panama Canal to the Red Chinese, there are now over 200,000 Red Chinese in the Canal Zone. This portends extremely serious problems for both the United States and Panama. A large percentage of Panamanian citizens want the U.S. to come back and restore the Canal Zone as before. Incidentally, the treaty giving the canal to Panama was never properly ratified. There were two versions of the treaty: an English version and a Spanish version. These two versions were NOT the same. The Senate ratified one version and the Panamanians ratified the other version. And the treason goes on and on.

The Bible predicts what is going to happen to the United States.

There are two beasts (powers) described in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation. The first has been shown to be the papacy, the Roman Catholic Church. The description of the second beast begins with Revelation 13:11. “And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon.”

The sea in Bible prophecy, you will remember, represents multitudes of people. The ascent of the first beast, the papacy, from the “sea” indicates that this power arose from the populated areas of Europe. The ascent of the second beast of Revelation 13 from the “earth” indicates that this power had its beginning in a sparsely populated area of the globe.

The previous verse, verse ten, gives us an indication of the time when this second beast was arising, for it refers to the deadly wound of verse three that the papacy received in the year 1798. “He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword.” Verse eleven, then, describes the ascent of this second beast at that time.

What nation was coming to power in the world around 1798 in a sparsely populated area of the world when the papacy received its deadly wound? The only nation coming to power at that time was the United States of America. The North American continent was then a very sparsely populated area of the globe. Consider the beast that is used to represent the United States. It has two horns like a lamb. What beast other than a lamb has two small lamb-like horns? The obvious answer is the bison, or buffalo, as it is more commonly referred to. The buffalo, whose habitat is the North American continent, appeared for many years as a symbol on United States nickels.

The two lamb-like horns of this beast symbolized the kind, gracious, and gentle nature of this country when it was young. That the horns had no crowns symbolized the great religious and political liberty available to all under the United States Constitution. The horns without crowns represented a nation without a king and a church without a pope. The powerful buffalo symbolized the superior strength of the United States. On American money the message of her trust in God was proclaimed, and the great blessing of God rested upon this country.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French philosopher of the last century, came to our shores to discover what magical quality enabled a handful of people to defeat the mighty British Empire twice in 35 years. He looked for the greatness of America in her fertile soil, her limitless forests and natural resources. He examined America’s schools, her Congress and her unique Constitution without fully understanding the source of America’s strength.

It was not, he said later, until he went to the churches of America and found congregations aflame with righteousness, that he began to comprehend the secret of this power. Upon his return to France, de Tocqueville wrote: “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” — Des Griffin, Descent into Slavery?, 1980, p. 267, Emissary Publications, 9205 S. E. Clackamas Rd., Clackamas, Oregon 97015, 503-824-2050, e-mail: midnight@midnight-emissary.com.

The United States was the champion of liberty and freedom throughout the world. Before this time no nation in history ever had a written constitution that guaranteed the liberty and freedom of its people. But the glorious beginning of this country was to be corrupted in later years. The gentle, gracious, freedom-loving character of the United States in its youth was later used as a facade to hide the character that this country subsequently developed. This facade has successfully kept hidden, even from most of its own citizens, the real character the United States developed in these last days as a result of Jesuit infiltration and subversion.

Revelation 13:11 tells us that this country will speak as a dragon. We saw that the dragon is Satan. How does the dragon speak? John 8:44 tells us, “You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” The devil is a liar. There is no truth in him. This great country, that began so beautifully by upholding the principles of morality and freedom, speaks, as Revelation 13:11 says, “as a dragon.” In these last days, the United States lies to the entire world, just as the dragon, the devil, does. The United States in these latter days deceives with a skill nearly equal to that of the devil himself, just as the Bible predicted, for the devil is using this country to play a major part in the disastrous events soon to take place. Most of its citizens readily believe the lies of this second beast, the United States.

Why does a country lie? Why does a person lie? Why does Satan lie? Lies are obviously used to deceive and to keep the truth from being known. Countries (and people) lie because a knowledge of their activities will hurt or embarrass them, or will prevent them from carrying out their sinister purposes. The fact that the United States speaks as the dragon shows that its government is engaged in criminal activities that its citizens and the rest of the world must not find out about. There are many thousands of examples of our government’s lying that could be discussed, but only two well-known examples will be considered here.
Perhaps the best known example of the United States government’s lies is our servicemen missing in action from the Vietnam and previous wars. Many very reliable reports of sightings have been documented, and photographs of men still alive have surfaced, but the government continues to lie about these men, claiming that they are all dead. How cruel it is for our government to simply abandon these men to rot in communist prisons for so many years after they risked their lives fighting in a war many of them felt was unjustifiable.

The second example of the United States lying to the world is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Many books have been written about the assassination that have put the lie to the official government version of what happened. The movie JFK very forcefully exposes the lies of the official government version of what happened and, along with many books on the assassination, shows that the assassination of President Kennedy was planned and organized at the highest levels of the U. S. Government. If the government has nothing to hide concerning this assassination, why were all the pertinent official documents of the assassination locked up until far into the twenty-first century? (Note: It is very unfortunate that the movie JFK used such revolting language and depicted such abominable scenes to tell the story of the assassination.)

Motion pictures were taken of President Kennedy during the assassination by one of the bystanders, a Mr. Zapruder. These pictures, which were locked in a vault for five years after the murder, show that the Warren Report could not possibly be true. The first time the American public got a look at these pictures was in the movie JFK. Why were the American people not permitted to view Mr. Zapruder’s film earlier? Because the people would realize that the Government was lying.

Later there was a congressional investigation of the assassination. The results of this investigation were also locked away so the citizens could not learn the truth about this murder. Why, unless the government has something to hide and has been lying to the people.

Presidential candidates and most other politicians running for office seem to be very proficient at lying. The news media lie almost continually to manipulate the people of the country.

Consider all the lies that were told about the Waco massacre and all the lies told about the many scandals of the Clinton administration. Other well-known subjects that the government continues to lie about are the destruction of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

Because of all the trouble and crime in society that the papacy’s subversion of the United States has caused, the papacy will use the backlash against the crime and trouble to have the government pass laws that enforce the papacy’s policies. As people come to a general realization that civilization simply cannot ignore God and morality and have any semblance of order and happiness, they will insist that the government pass laws to restore morality and decency in society. The French realized this after three and a half years of the unbridled excesses of the French Revolution. The French people found that they simply could not reject the Bible, and the government passed laws allowing the return of the Scriptures and religious freedom. Incidentally, the French Revolution was the result of the people of France rebelling against the iron handed rule of the papacy.

When the people of the United States, led by the papacy, become aware that the cause of all the trouble and problems in society is the disregard of religious morality, they will pressure Congress to pass laws supposedly to try to reverse decades of damage to the United States. Unfortunately these laws will be designed to legislate morality as defined by the papacy. If a society is going to have moral principles, it will be because of proper education, not legislation.

These religious laws that the United States is going to pass in the near future will cause the events of Revelation 13:12 to occur. “And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.”

Here we see that the United States will soon exercise all the power of the first beast, the papacy, and cause the people of earth to worship the papacy. What could the United States do that would force people to worship the papacy? In direct defiance of the Constitution, the United States will pass laws demanding obedience to papal religious requirements.

We have seen that Sunday observance was instituted by the papacy and that those who observe Sunday according to papal dictates instead of God’s Sabbath, Saturday, are worshiping the papacy. The United States, therefore, will pass laws requiring her citizens to observe Sunday as the day to be kept holy! (Remember that the pope’s Jesuits have been infiltrating the U. S. Government and other organizations for many decades.) That such a law would be passed in America may seem very unlikely at this time; nevertheless this is Bible prophecy and it will, indeed, be fulfilled exactly as verse twelve indicates. Actually, such laws are not as farfetched as they might seem. Many states now have Sunday laws on the books. These laws, usually referred to as “blue laws,” demand the closure of certain businesses on Sunday.

Today the papacy and her many daughter religions, including non-Christian religions and the New Age movement, are working to consolidate the churches of the world into a single worldwide religion. Because of all the crime and violence in society and the world, and because of the increasingly heavy hand of government regulation and taxes, the people will come to realize that they need the restraints of religion in order to preserve freedom and order, and they will combine the false religions of the world into a vast one-world ecumenical religion that the Bible refers to as the false prophet. Revelation 16:13,14 and other verses mention this false prophet. “And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon [Satan], and out of the mouth of the beast [the Catholic Church], and out of the mouth of the false prophet [ecumenical Protestantism]. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, that go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.”

The Sunday law will be one of the results of this false ecumenical religion. The people will mistakenly pressure government to go against the first amendment to the Constitution and legislate religious doctrine — in this case false religious doctrine.

The last issue of contention in this world will be over religion, specifically over which is the proper day on which to worship — Saturday, God’s holy Sabbath day, or Sunday, the day set up by the papacy — and we will soon witness religious persecution worse than the world has ever seen.

Because of its position of leadership that the United States enjoys in the world, and because of the Jesuit influence, the rest of the world will follow its example and will also pass religious laws requiring Sunday observance. The papacy will be the driving force behind this great Sunday movement. Satan and the papacy know that the scheme to establish a political New World Order through the United Nations to take over the world will not work. Through use of the trouble caused by trying to institute the New World Order, trouble caused by atheism, liberalism, socialism, radicalism, and terrorism, they are conditioning the world for these worldwide religious laws, especially the Sunday laws.

Continuing with the prophecy, Revelation 13:13 shows that the United States will dazzle the world with its great feats. “And he does great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.” Has the United States ever made fire come down from heaven in the sight of the whole world? During the Second World War this country dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan, and fire, indeed, came down from heaven. The reference to “great wonders” refers to the exalted level of technological excellence this country enjoys and the scientific marvels this country has accomplished.

Further describing the United States, Revelation 13:14 says, “And deceives them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles that he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, that had the wound by a sword, and did live.”

An image is a copy, a duplication. The first beast, the papacy, is a union of church and state; the armies and police power of the state carry out the demands and dictates of the church as in the Dark Ages. This union of church and state will be duplicated by the United States. Catholics and other religious denominations in the United States will join together in a great ecumenical alliance and will pass religious laws including the national Sunday law. When this happens, the United States will repudiate its glorious beginning of total civil and religious freedom and will become a union of church and state in a vain attempt to dictate morality to its citizens. The United States will use its police power to enforce obedience to the doctrines and dictates of this great ecumenical alliance, thus becoming the image of the beast. We see this beginning to happen today as the so-called religious right becomes more powerful.

Before the end comes, this country will repudiate every principle of its Constitution. The injunction of the first amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the government from making any religious laws will not prevent this prophecy from being realized, and the fires of religious persecution will again be kindled. Those who insist on keeping God’s Sabbath day, Saturday, holy according to the Fourth Commandment will suffer severe persecution, as the following verse shows.

Revelation 13:15: “And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Thus, we see that in America the true Christians who continue to keep Saturday, God’s Sabbath day, holy will be in danger of losing their lives. As impossible as this sounds to us today, remember that the unconditional prophecies of the Bible never fail. Many of us will live to witness this persecution, that will eventually become so severe that it will be a matter of life or death, and many people will be killed. “. . . The time will come, that whoever kills you will think that he does God service.” (John 16:2)

We have recently seen the colossal abuse of governmental power against a religious sect in Waco, Texas. Consider how much of our Constitution had been repudiated in that fiasco. Without due process of law and without a trial, many people including women and young children were murdered in this despicable abuse of power by our government, that was shockingly similar to the Gestapo tactics used in Hitler’s Germany. Virtually every thing the government and the news media said about this sect and the military operation in Waco was a lie, told to try to justify the government’s actions. Before the government was finished with this operation, they tried to bulldoze all the evidence into oblivion.

Satan is planning to cause unbelievable trouble on the earth. This trouble will take many forms, from calamities of nature to political and civil unrest. The increase in the frequency and severity of earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes testifies that this trouble is already starting. Eventually the people who keep God’s Sabbath day holy will be blamed for this trouble. The claim will be made that God is angry because this small group of people refuses to obey the Sunday law. People will claim that the trouble is the result, and if the world were rid of the Sabbath-keepers the trouble would cease. Thus the Sabbath-keepers, God’s true people, are to be killed.

Satan has been trying for nearly 6,000 years to get mankind to break God’s laws. He has tried enticement with sinful pleasures. He has tried deception to convince mankind that the wrong way is the correct way. He has infiltrated his ministers (Jesuits) into the churches. He has used force. He used communism in an attempt to remove all traces of the Word of God from the earth. But no matter what he has done, there have always been a few people who have been true to God. In these last days of earth’s history the devil is getting desperate, for he knows that he is going to die, and he can see that his end is very near. “Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has but a short time.” (Revelation 12:12). Once more, in desperation, Satan is going to employ force, this time to a degree never before attempted, in an effort to exterminate every one of Christ’s true Sabbath-keeping Christians.

Tactics that the United States will use in this religious persecution to suppress liberty of conscience are described in Revelation 13:16,17: “And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” The mark of the beast; what is it?

Great economic pressure will be brought to bear on the people who remain true to God and who continue to observe Saturday, His holy Sabbath day. These people will be totally isolated economically from society. They will not be able to hold a job; they will not be able to buy groceries; they will not be able to sell anything in order to obtain food or anything else they need unless they reject God and start keeping Sunday. They will be under extreme pressure to yield their faith to the papacy and to the devil, for the entire world will be arrayed against them. Imagine what life will be like for these people who refuse to receive the mark of the beast. This will be a time of severe trouble, and many who are not sincere will succumb to this extreme economic pressure. Then, since some will remain true to God and continue to obey His Fourth Commandment and keep Saturday, His Sabbath day, holy, the ultimate punishment will be decreed: these people shall be put to death.

On the other hand, God’s warning against receiving the mark of the beast is the most severe warning given in the entire Bible. It is found in Revelation 14:9-11. “And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, that is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascends up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.”

Those who receive the mark of the beast will continue to lead normal lives for a short time before the time of trouble, the seven last plagues, begins. They will be able to go to work and buy the necessities and comforts of life, but they will not be able to face the Lord Jesus when He returns to this earth.

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THE DRAMATIC EVENTS OF
EARTH’S FINAL HOURS
Second Edition

NO EYE HAS SEEN,NO EAR HAS HEARD,NO MIND HAS CONCEIVEDWHAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSEWHO LOVE HIM — First Corinthians 2:9New International Version
Unless otherwise mentioned, all Biblical quotations are taken from the King James Version.

For the complete text in PDF format, click here

Source: http://www.pacinst.com/efh/chapter13/us.html

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